Novelist and journalist Dave Hill

September 18, 2007

With the worst apparently over, Gordon finally popped up to say something soothing about Northern Rock. I heard it the radio earlier: the expected ooze about our strong economy withstanding the turbulence, and so on. I suppose the jury's still out on that one. And speaking of juries, the first "citizens" one on the NHS took place in Birmingham today, in a non blaze of publicity. For a flavour of how the future is going to be spun, read the following extract from this article on "consultation":

"With rising citizen expectations, the advance of new technologies and a much sharper understanding of the impact of lifestyle choices, the challenges that today's National Health Service faces are very different from those of 20 years ago. I believe we can only meet these challenges by remaining true to the values of the NHS - free at the point of use, open to all, rooted in the British belief in fairness and compassion - but I also know that no modern health service can afford to stand still."

Why do those words make my blood temperature fall? Well, there are these thoughts from GP Ann Robinson writing on Cif about primary care reform:

"I'm sure Sir [Ara] Darzi's a great knight and probably a wonderful doctor. But he's spent his life in hospitals, and primary care is a very different beast. He's apparently going to tell Gordon Brown that the answer to improving access to primary care is to let Boots, Virgin, or Tesco run the show."

OK, let's not dismiss such a notion out of hand. But then there's this news from the Mail:

"The entrepreneur who relaunched Pizza Express has been asked to run a chain of NHS cancer clinics. Luke Johnson is in talks with one of Britain's leading cancer specialists to set up a string of 'cancer express' centres that will offer patients every aspect of care from initial screening to chemotherapy."

Luke Johnson. Yep, he's the boss of Channel 4 who made such a pig's ear of handling the great Big Brother racism row. Put it this way: I don't mind eating Johnson's Sloppy Giuseppe, but I wouldn't want him inspecting me for tumours.

September 17, 2007

Is it just me being contrary or there fewer and fewer reasons for a left-of-centre person not to reject Labour in favour of the party of Old Man Ming? I'm just asking: not that I haven't been "just asking" myself the same question at every general election since at least 1992 (I vote Labour locally but haven't at the Big One since 1987). Once you've dug down through the dreary media layers of leadership speculation and looked at the policies, how can your natural loyalties not be called into question? Let's see: they want to reduce the tax burden on the poorest in society and raise it on the richest; they're against identity cards; they're bolder on the environment...

Yes, yes, I know, lots of people like me keep "just asking" themselves the same question and sometimes switch to the party in yellow. But there's always the same problem: they've no chance of forming a government unless there's a change in the electoral system and there won't be a change in the electoral system unless they're in government. And even if they form a coalition with Labour after the next election, the change-maker won't stand for making that change. Plus they're a bit wacky, aren't they? All this underlines the big, recurring question - what are they actually for? Maybe Polly Toynbee has a point.

September 16, 2007

Does it mean something that Alistair Darling - he's the Chancellor, as you may not have noticed - was the one metaphorically sent out of Number 10 (he and Sibyl live upstairs there) as Northern Rock sank to demand old-fashioned banking and cry, "Don't panic" in vain? Until then it was Gordon who'd made the soothing noises when Bad Things happened: the car bombs, the floods, the foot-and-mouth. I recognise that money markets are Alistair's patch and all that, but isn't it a little odd that Gord has disappeared from sight since the squalid episode with Margaret Thatcher, except to utter warm words about Darfur?

Maybe the panic withdrawal of two billion quid - two billion! - doesn't qualify as a big enough crisis for the PM to call for calm. On the other hand, perhaps he anticipated that young Dave would try to pin it all on him and went into hiding accordingly. If so, his self-preservation instinct was sound. Yet Cameron's piece in today's Sunday Telegraph and George Osborne's remarks to the BBC have a wishful-thinking feeling about them. There will have to be worse things for Alistair to defend before enough people start blaming Gordon for them. But what if those things are on their way?

September 14, 2007

Apart from outsmarting the Tories, what is Gordon actually for? I've been as mesmerised as anyone by his tactical know-how and repositioning skills of a deftness that seemed unlikely in a man who'd previously appeared about as manoeuvrable as a concrete sideboard. But here we are at the start of autumn and apart from a welcome change of tone from Tone, what has there been to get excited about? And what other changes does the change-maker envisage?

Assuming that young Ed Miliband is still filling pages of his brand new exercise book with Wizard Ideas For The Manifesto, what thoughts could it possibly contain? Ways of correcting the corrosive effects of inequality? Addressing the institutionalisation of gang crime? Boldly facing up to the inadequacies of our education system and their implications for too many of our children? If it were, that would be an exercise book I'd like to read. But I've a feeling Gordon has other priorities.

September 13, 2007

It's hard to put into words the moral bankruptcy this picture epitomises. I mean that in a different way from Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, who said:

"This is a huge political mistake which will cost the Labour party credibility with their core voters and communities up and down the country that still bear the scars of the damage she caused."

Dream on, comrade. Plenty of your members voted for her - unfortunately. No, the offence is both subtler and deeper. Gordon is, in fact, the least stained by the stunt of inviting Margaret Thatcher round to Number 10 for tea a few days after saying how much he admires her: at least he could claim it was a wizard political ploy that has further wrongfooted Young Cameron.

Thatcher, though, has no such excuse. Her acceptance of Brown's tactical invitation was itself tactical, designed to fuck over her latest successor as Tory leader for daring to deviate from her path. The arrogance. The malice. The disloyalty. It takes your breath away.

And, of course, the media is shamed by the "story" too. For it is not a story - at least, it's no more than a piece of quirky, down-the-page filler. Thatcher may represent a strand of Conservative opinion, but her visit to Number 10 was, of itself, of no political significance. It has acquired some only because the BBC and others deciding to invest it with some. A grubby little episode all round.

September 12, 2007

There have been two familiar themes to Gordon's public doings during my technology troubles. Let's call them by their familiar names: Prudence and Britishness. The pair are integral to the change-maker's political identity, but what direction are they taking him - and us - in?

Monday's speech to the TUC saw both being asserted, the first in the face of audience displeasure (public sector pay must be restrained), the second serving to pacify it (let's get our people into work) but both working in tandem to woo an audience beyond the hall. That audience, of course, is not "the country" as a whole but those sections of it that decide general elections; swing voters who occupy that sacred space "the centre ground."

The political calculation is that these voters give Gordon the credit he claims for building a "stable economy" and take comfort from his sending a stern message to the unions. It is also that they are those most fearful that "our culture" is under attack, which is why Jacqui Smith was so eager to, uh, flag up the section of Gord's speech about skilled migrants from outside the EU being required in future to be able to speak, write and understand English to A-C grade GCSE standard (presumably this means that all native skilled workers whose English isn't at that level will face deportation, tee-hee).

Question One: Will It Bring In Votes? Probably. Whatever public sympathy exists for civil servants and prison officers is unlikely to extend to supporting sustained industrial action, especially as so much of Gord's investment as chancellor has gone on pay. Prudence wins the day. And Britishness, of course, plays to the fear factor just as effectively.

Question Two: Will It Help Sustain A "Progressive Consensus" - Gord's term, apparently - Worthy Of The Name? Depends what you mean by "progressive." If "progressive" is about restricting the prosperity of those who deliver services essential to the Common Good in the name of stability while doing rather less to restrain the growth of private wealth thought by some to be far more responsible for inflationary pressures and "broken" communities, then no. And if "progressive" means erecting emotive cultural barriers as a means of discouraging inward migration from non English-speaking, non EU countries - code for "darkies" in some minds - then it looks like no again.

I'm pretty lukewarm about Prudence and Britishness, at least in their present incarnations. Or is that being terribly unfair?

September 07, 2007

It seems that Gordon put his feet up today. The Number 10 website displays only a bunch of very boring snapshots from this week of "new type of politics". This leaves me no choice but to occupy myself further considering the government's education policies, the ones Ed Balls has been defending and re-pledging with great energy. In The Telegraph, Jeff Randall - a former grammar school boy, he'll have you know - argues that the extra billions "New" Labour has pumped into the state system have been wasted. He claims that truancy rates are no better than when the Tories left office although, curiously, he seems to pin the blame for this on truants themselves rather than the government:

"It's difficult to sympathise with serial truants whose idea of a rewarding chemistry lesson is finding out which glue works best when sniffed."

Randall, I sense, thinks it tremendously butch to write a sentence like that. How sweet. Anyway, he's on stronger ground when considering standards: not much stronger when spouting the usual pap about "soft" new subjects replacing "hard" traditional ones but quite a bit stronger when citing Robert Coe's report on grade inflation and Christine Merrell et al's on the lack of impact - so far - of Early Years policies. And he certainly has a point when citing universities' alarm about undergraduates' basic skills.

But Randall fails to offer any ideas for spending public money more wisely. One, I expect, would be to, er, bring back grammar schools. But while these might benefit a small number of children, including a few from relatively poor or non-academic homes, it would do nothing for all the rest, including those of what Randall tenderly terms "scumbag parents" - children from those margins of society who need the salvation of a good education most desperately. And what nostalgists like Randall fail to acknowledge - and what David Willetts was sacrificed for pointing out - is that patterns of social class are now so ingrained in Britain that no crude sheep-from-goats test imposed at age eleven will disrupt them.

The reality is that too many British schools are failing to provide a safe and suitable environment for learning either the basic skills or the subtler ones all children need for negotiating contemporary life. They are also failing to help all children equally. Those of whatever ability at the bottom of the social heap - and their families - are going to need a great deal of extra help from the state system if they are to prosper in the modern world. At least Ed Balls seems to have spotted this last problem. The question is does he have the political will to put it and all the other ones right?

September 06, 2007

It took me a while to find even a partial explanation of how a Citizens Jury is assembled, and that has only appeared on any government website thanks to lobby hacks asking about it this morning. Seems that the 40 or 50 "jurors" in today's inaugural, er, hearing comprised pupils and staff put forward by the new academy in Bristol that hosted the event, together with some chosen from a "list of community stakeholders" and others found by means of a "door-to-door recruitment programme" in the school's vicinity. Both the list and the recruitment were the work of the DCFS. How truly "representative of the local community" was this gathering, I wonder? Asked if the exercise was really much different from any other school visit, Gordon's spokesman described it as "a very structured event." Hmmm. Structured to exclude awkward questions, possibly? Who could be blamed for wondering?

It also emerged that the polling company Opinion Leader "organised things" - whatever that meant - on this occasion, and the spokesman seems to have been at pains to insist that Gord's pollster Deborah Mattinson is now a former OL employee. I'm not sure how that squares with this. Maybe it's just out of date. Whatever, OL's involvement does nothing to allay the feeling that this jury was effectively nobbled from the start. Surprise, surprise? Not really. That's politics, etcetera. But I did, for the first time, shout "Oh, fuck off," at the telly on Tuesday when the change-maker professed his admiration for Margaret Thatcher. A voter can only stand so much positioning strategy. Tell me, Gord, when does the "new-style politics" begin?

September 05, 2007

I'm only now appreciating how cut off from my normal life I was during my three days in Venice. Even now I've barely started catching up. Yesterday I'd settled down to read the Big Speech Gordon made on Monday and suddenly he was doing his first monthly press conference in which he talked about raising school standards, how to better protect children from harmful media influences (a consultation) and tackling gun crime. Today, he's been addressing the small matter of ridding the world of disease leaving me to figure out if the change-maker's Big Speech talk of a "new-style politics" will amount to anything more than a lot of PR noise. It would help if I could decipher what the following passage from it - copied from the 10 Downing Street website - actually means:

"So only a new kind of politics can help us meet these challenges, whether it is tackling crime or gang violence, the future health of the nation or climate change, the solutions will not come from simply a narrow debate between what states do and what markets do. We found in the 20th century the limits of this paradigm is through people themselves, through cultural and social change that we will see the difference being made. It is people who are engaged in changing the world as individuals, parents, neighbours and active citizens that will be the next momentum for change."

August 31, 2007

Every time I switched on the radio today one of the princes was there to depress me. Lost lads trying to do the right thing and all that, but they've both got a bit missing, haven't they? Only question is, is it the same bit? (Just asking.) Gordon was there, of course, sitting with Tony Messiah. Which reminds me - the only thing worse than hearing whichever prince it was struggling to do justice to the occasion was the re-runs of Tone's grisly "people's princess" spiel. Once more, I am reminded of how wonderful it is to have him gone. And with that, over to Martha Kearney on Gordon's difficult balancing act with the public sector unions:

"A few headlines about standing up to the unions may help his standing more generally but strikes and disruption would surely tarnish his honeymoon. A disgruntled party may not want to pull out all the stops in an election campaign."

Sounds like serious politics will be resuming soon. Are you awake, Your Majesty?